Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton

Preface

ix Preface to the Updated Edition lucille clifton’s death at age seventy-three on February 13, 2010, precipitated a flood of tributes and fond remembrances. The New York Times pronounced her “a distinguished American poet whose work trained lenses wide and narrow on the experience of being black and female in the twentieth century.”1 Her friend and fellow poet Elizabeth Alexander wrote on the New Yorker’s website, “I do not think there is an American poet as beloved as Clifton, or one whose influence radiated as widely.” Alexander pointed out that few people were aware that Clifton was ill, let alone on the brink of death.2 Although her health problems were well known to her friends and well documented in her poetry, in the past she had always rebounded . Neither cancer nor kidney failure had kept her from returning to the public stage where she performed her own metaphorical healing ritual on audiences with her precise and uncompromising poems. But this time, a bacterial infection that prompted the removal of her spleen could not be contained, and Clifton died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore with her children by her side. The Bu≠alo News, publishing the first obituary online, rightfully claimed Clifton as one of Bu≠alo’s own. Clifton’s half sister Elaine Philip recalled what it was like growing up with a precocious young author in the house: “She was always writing, always inventing stu≠ to do,” she said. “My brother and I had no problem washing the dishes for her so she could tell us stories at nighttime.” The article quoted Clifton’s 2002 interview with the newspaper in which she called herself “a Bu≠alo girl,” but o≠ered a few words of criticism for the city where she’d spent most of her youth: “You know, it seems to me that Bu≠alo is a little bit behind the times in some ways, even 1. Margalit Fox, “Lucille Clifton, Poet Who Explored Intricacies of Black Lives, Dies at 73,” New York Times (17 February 2010) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/arts/17clifton.html (accessed 21 July 2011). 2. Elizabeth Alexander, “Remembering Lucille Clifton,” New Yorker (17 February 2010), http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/02/remembering-lucille-clifton.html (accessed 31 December 2010). x preface today. Bu≠alo’s poor people of all colors and ethnicities—they seem to not have a lot of help. That’s not the way you build a beloved community.”3 In case there was any doubt about her intent, she noted, “I’m a poet. It’s my job to record these things. I’m not here to make friends.”4 Many of Clifton’s readers thought of her as a dear friend even if they had only seen her on stage or watched a recorded reading. Her poems and warm presence inspired and ennobled audiences who came for her good humor and epigrammatic brevity but stayed for the spiraling depths of her truth. It was no accident that Clifton so often moved her fans to tears: she made them see the beauty and drama and heartbreak of their lives through the prism of her own. In that way she was (and is) a great liberator, but equally impressive, she was (and is) a master of control, both poetically and rhetorically. She set the terms for what we might call the Lucille Clifton immersion experience. In her public appearances and in interviews, Clifton was fond of repeating aphorisms and rejoinders that had worked for her in the past. Because her poetry revealed so much about her innermost thoughts and feelings, she seemed to be protecting herself from too much exposure and perhaps saving her creative energy for her art. As my interview in this volume attests, she wanted people to know she was shy; that shyness accompanied supreme self-control. Her persona as a big-hearted but exacting poet was hard to get past—and Clifton clearly wanted it that way. As she told one reporter, “My poetry is not my life. My life is my life.”5 Although she talked freely about her love of theme parks and other recreational pastimes, she was never as forthcoming or loquacious as, for instance, Sonia Sanchez, with whom she shared the stage for a reading and public conversation recorded in a 2002 issue of Callaloo.6 She told me in my 1998 interview with her, “If I’m being ‘Lucille Clifton...